Dag: 5 november 2018

Israeli forces fire at Palestinians on the 15th marine protests in the Gaza Strip

Scores of Palestinians were injured as a result of Israeli occupation forces’ crackdown on the 15th marine protests in the Gaza Strip today.

Occupation forces opened fire with their machine guns and fired a barrage of gas bombs at the peaceful demonstrators.

Dozens were injured as a result.

“The march of return will not stop until the fulfilment of all its goals, first and foremost the lifting of the siege completely from the Gaza Strip and end the suffering of two million besieged Palestinians,” organisers said.

Israel this weekend banned a Palestinian-American author from participating in a Palestinian literature festival in occupied East Jerusalem.

Susan Abulhawa – known for her novel “Mornings in Jenin” – was banned from participating in the Kalimat Palestinian Literature Festival being held in occupied East Jerusalem this weekend. Upon landing at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, Abulhawa was detained for 36 hours and subsequently deported back to the US, where she currently lives and holds citizenship.

Although Abulhawa appealed the decision in Israel’s Supreme Court, her appeal was rejected, the Times of Israel (ToI) reported. Spokeswoman for Israel’s immigration authority, Sabine Haddad, said that Abulhawa had been refused entry because of a 2015 incident when she had refused to answer questions by Israeli occupation forces when attempting to enter Israel from Jordan. Haddad explained that “[Abulhawa] was refused entry then and told that the next time she arrived she had to coordinate in advance,” however this weekend “she landed without arranging entry in advance,” ToI added.

In a statement to the Kalimat festival (published in full by Mondoweiss), Abulhawa said that:

As you all know by now, Israeli authorities have denied me entry into my country and I am therefore unable to attend the festival. It pains me greatly not to be with my friends and fellow writers to explore and celebrate our literary traditions with readers and with each other in our homeland. It pains me that we can meet anywhere in the world except in Palestine, the place to which we belong, from whence our stories emerge and where all our turns eventually lead.

Speaking out against the claim that she should have coordinated her visit in advance, Abulhawa continued: “This is a lie. In fact, I was told upon arrival at the airport that I had been required to apply for a visa to my US passport, and that this application would not be accepted until 2020, at least five years after the first time they denied me entry.”

“They [Israel] said it was my responsibility to know this even though I was never given any indication of being banned,” she added.

Abulhawa also claimed that she was able to smuggle electronic and writing equipment into the prison cell where she was held, saying: “I have photos and video from inside that terrible detention centre, which I took with a second phone hidden on my body, and I left for them a few messages on the walls by the dirty bed I had to lay on. I suppose they will find it vulgar to read: “Free Palestine,” “Israel is an Apartheid State,” or “Susan Abulhawa was here and smuggled this pencil into her prison cell”.

Israel has deported many high-profile figures this year, most of who were accused of being affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Among those deported were Ariel Gold, a Jewish-American activist with Code Pink and Ana Sanchez Mera, a Spanish activist affiliated with the BDS National Committee (BNC).

In what was seen as a landmark case, in October Palestinian-American student Lara Alqasem successfully appealed against Israel’s attempt to ban her from studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The 22-year-old was held in Ben Gurion Airport for two weeks while her appeal was heard, with Israel’s Supreme Court eventually ruling that the country’s controversial anti-BDS law did not apply to her case. The court condemned Israel’s stringent attitude towards Alqasem, ruling that “since [her] actions do not sufficiently warrant banning her entry to Israel, the unavoidable impression is that her political opinions were the reason behind the cancellation of the visa that was granted to her. If that is indeed the case, we are talking about a radical and dangerous step.”

Some of the Israeli officials were documented approaching the women seated outside Damascus Gate and trying to confiscate their goods

Israeli officials were captured on film confiscating goods from Palestinian vendors in Jerusalem’s Old City, reported Haaretz.

The Jerusalem city inspectors “were videotaped seizing merchandise from elderly Palestinian women, then chasing them away from the Damascus Gate plaza”, the paper reported.

According to Haaretz, “the women arrive at the site every Friday from the West Bank and East Jerusalem” to “sell fresh vegetables, olives and grape leaves, either from their own gardens or that they pick elsewhere”.

Some of the Israeli officials “were documented approaching the women seated outside Damascus Gate and trying to confiscate their goods. In the video the women hasten to put away their goods to try to prevent them from being seized”.

“While the vendors were being chased off, some of their goods fell to the ground, and several women could be seen picking up some olives. In at least one instance an inspector seized one of the women’s wares,” Haaretz added.

Jerusalem municipality said in response: “We regret that once again the manipulative lies of the vendors is being given a platform”.

“The merchandise was not toppled by the inspectors, who requested repeatedly that they clear the area, but by the vendors who did so in order to create a false presentation of supposed violence being used against them”.

“These are vendors from the territories operating illegally and without permits, disrupting businesses at the site, blocking passageways and sidewalks, and endangering pedestrians.”

An Israeli military court yesterday sentences a Palestinian cancer patient to 13 months in jail and issued a fine of 3,000 shekels ($812).

According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), Israeli forces detained 22-year-old Ali Mahmoud Hanoun, a resident from the northern occupied West Bank district of Qalqiliya, who suffers from cancer of the lymphocytes.

PPS added that Hanoun has been detained since March.

Despite Hanoun’s medical condition, the Israeli Salem military court sentenced him to 13 months in prison, in addition to paying a fine of 3,000 shekels ($812).

PPS said that Israeli authorities claimed that following his detention, medical tests were performed on Hanoun and showed that he no longer suffers from the disease.

PPS also noted that Hanoun was receiving cancer treatment when he was detained in March.

According to prisoners’ rights group Addameer, there are 5,640 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli prisons, of whom 465 are in administrative detention, 53 are female prisoners, 270 are children, and 50 of the children are under the age of 16.

50 years on, tens of thousands of Palestinians detained for political protest | #PalPrisoners

The destruction of Palestine by Israel and the destruction of the world’s environment by humanity through human-made climate change, the dramatic increase of plastic in the oceans and the food chain, loss of forests etc are not connected even in the minds of most activists, not to speak of the public.

Yet they are. Governments and politicians who support Israeli occupation and Apartheid are not limiting the destruction they are causing just to Palestine; most of the time they are also standing against legislation protecting the environment and support climate change denial or claim that the price for protecting the environment and stopping the ongoing sixth mass extinction would be ‘too high’ for business – the same excuse that they wield against the call to boycott the Israeli occupation.

We find this among the worst – like the coming Bolsonaro regime in Brazil, as keen to destroy the Amazon rainforest as it’s helping Israel to destroy Palestine and the Trump administration in the United States, among the first to praise Bolsonaro’s victory (Israel and Bolsonaro exchanged mutual declarations of love first) – and the supposedly better, like the Trudeau government in Canada.

To the Canadian Liberals the obsession to build new oil pipes through indigenous lands with their fragile ecosystems is as strong as their desire to hug Israel – just in the last week Canada’s Liberal government declared that it’s support for Netanyahu’s regime is ‘ironclad’ and that it wants to be ‘an asset to Israel’ in the United Nations. This is part of their competition with the Canadian Conservatives, now Trump clones, which of them can be the most destructive towards the environment of Canada and the most supportive towards the Israeli occupation and Apartheid.

On the other hand if a party, politician or a government seems honestly trying to work against the threat of climate change and other horrors unleashed on the environment by the humanity, then they tend to be more critical of Israeli occupation and more ready to show at least some support towards the liberation of the Palestinian people – like the Labour Party in the Great Britain, smeared with ‘antisemitism’ claims by supporters and apologists of Israel’s regime.

Is this just a case that people who hold decent opinions when it comes to one political issue tend to do that overall, because they are good people – as much as the good character straits of any person can survive for long in politics?

Partly yes. We can quote George W. Bush, with some liberty taken, and say that people who support Israeli occupation and Apartheid and oppose action to protect the environment of planet Earth do so because ‘they are bad people who support bad things because they are bad’. But behind them tend to be the same corporations and the same billionaires, who see Israeli occupation, fascist rule in Brazil, the destruction of Amazon rainforest and fishes giving way to plastic in our oceans as ‘business opportunities’.

This is the era of free market capitalism without morals or remembrance of where its roots lie, in the soil of the planet Earth and the teeming human billions of the planet. The success of global capitalism has been to raise its leaders to the status of gods in theology, ‘beyond good and evil’ – a situation where, always, evil ends up ruling. Because billionaires and corporations in their Olympian heights are driven by the endless quest for ‘business opportunities’. A village destroyed and an illegal colony built are just part of the endless quest for profits to drive up the stock prices, but on the ground it’s real people suffering, a real nation enslaved and its oppressing state being devoured by the gangrene of Apartheid.

We have to understand the Israeli occupation and its illegal colonial project in the occupied territories is tied to the overall problems facing humanity; one of the local long-term symptoms of the same affliction in the global body politic and social. The terrible war and famine in Yemen, fed by tens of billions of sales of arms to Saudi-Arabia and the United Arab Emirates by the same ‘Western” governments who make their regular oaths of supportbfor Israel, is a more recent symptom – one in a long line of attempts to support ‘Western’ economies through warfare in the Middle East.

The problem, simply, is greed – the neo-liberal axiom that greed is good, and that supposedly eventually the greed of those at the top will also benefit those below – or at least those of them, who are not ground to make the profit for the masters of modern Olympos. The spread of neo-liberalist policies in the world and the spread of illegal Israeli colonies in the occupied territories correlates, and the reason is not a co-incidence.

The illegal Israeli colonies are connected to the overall current world system and to oppose them is to oppose the whole corrupt system of ‘greed is good’ which threatens the entire planet’s biosphere and whole of humanity with it.

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, approved passing a bill into law that allows execution of Palestinian prisoners, Hebrew-language news sites reported on Monday.Netanyahu reportedly gave the green light, on Sunday, to members of his Likud policitical party to support the law on the execution of Palestinian prisoners, a law introduced in 2017 by the Yisrael Beiteinu party, which is headed by the Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

At the time, Lieberman said that the bill would be a powerful deterrent to Palestinians, “We must not allow terrorists to know that after a murder they have committed, they will sit in prison, enjoy the conditions and may be released in the future.”

Despite that Israel currently has a law allowing death penalty, it has not been carried out since 1962 when the Jewish state executed Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann.However, the current law allows Israeli military courts to only hand down the death penalty if a panel of three judges impose a unanimous decision.The proposed bill would remove this condition which would allow both Israeli civilian and military courts to carry out executions against Palestinians convicted of murder. In addition, it would require military courts to carry out executions by a majority of two judges instead of full consensus by all judges.

Many Palestinian politicians and human rights activists have already denounced the bill and expressed concern that it will give Israel “legal cover to target Palestinians,” and argued that although it does not define a specific group, it is “intended mainly for the Palestinian people.”The controversial bill had previously passed its preliminary vote in January with 52 votes in favor and 49 opposing.

According to prisoners rights group Addameer, currently there are 5,640 Palestinian prisoners currently being held in Israeli prisons, of whom 465 are in administrative detention, 53 are female prisoners, 270 are child prisoners, and 50 are under the age of 16.

NABLUS (Ma’an) — A four-month-old infant was injured, on late Sunday, afterIsraeli settlers attacked her parents’ vehicle as they passed by near the illegal Israeli settlement of Havat Gilad, west of the northern occupied West Bank city of Nablus.

A Ma’an reporter confirmed that a four-month-old infant was admitted to a hospital in Nablus City, where she was treated for a head injury.The injury was reported as mild.

Reports said that Ali Shawahneh, from the Kafr Thulth village, east of the northern West Bank district of Qalqiliya, was heading home along with his family when Israeli settlers attacked their vehicle as they passed near the illegal Havat Gilad settlement.

Israeli settlers threw rocks at the vehicle, forcing Shawahneh to suddenly stop, resulting in his infant daughter’s head hitting the glass and leading to her injury.

Locals said that an Israeli military vehicle arrived to the scene to take statements from the family regarding the incident; No ambulance was called to the scene.

In October, Aisha Muhammad Talal al-Rabi, 47, a mother of eight children, from the Bidya village near Salfit in the northern occupied West Bank, was killed and her husband was injured, after Israeli settlers hurled rocks at their vehicle near the Zaatara checkpoint in Nablus, in the northern West Bank.

Palestinian towns and villages in the Nablus area are surrounded by Israeli settlements and outposts, many of which are protected by the Israeli military and have gained notoriety for being comprised of the most extremist settlers.The Palestinian government has no jurisdiction over Israelis in the West Bank, and violent acts carried out by Israeli settlers often occur in the presence of Israeli military forces who rarely act to protect Palestinian residents.The majority of settler attacks committed against Palestinians are met with impunity, with Israelis rarely facing consequences for such attacks.Only 1.9 percent of complaints submitted by Palestinians against Israeli settler attacks result in a conviction, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din reported.

Israeli soldiers shot, on Monday at dawn, a Palestinian man in his own home, and abducted his son, in Halhoul town, north of Hebron, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank. The army also abducted four other Palestinians in Hebron and Ramallah.

Media sources in Hebron said the soldiers invaded the home of Khaled Shehda ad-Douda, 50, before searching and ransacking the property and abducted his son, Mohannad.

They added that the soldiers fired live rounds in the home, moderately wounding Khaled’s father in his left leg, before he was rushed to the Hebron governmental hospital.

In addition, the soldiers invaded and searched several homes in Beit Ummar and Beit Kahil towns, near Hebron, and abducted Abdul-Majid Ali ‘Aadi, 30, and Talha Mohammad Zohoor.

The soldiers also installed roadblocks at Hebron’s northern entrances, in addition to Sa’ir and Halhoul town, before stopping and searching dozens of cars, and interrogated many Palestinians while inspecting their ID cards.

In related news, the soldiers invaded Kafr Ni’ma village, west of the central West Bank city of Ramallah, and Silwad town, east of the city, searched several homes and abducted Ahmad Hasan Nasr and Ahmad Mousa Hamed.

A Palestinian teenage boy died from, on Sunday evening, from serious wounds he suffered a day earlier, after Israeli soldiers shot and seriously injured him, in Central Gaza.

The slain Palestinian has been identified as Emad Khalil Shahin, 17, from the Nusseirat refugee camp in Central Gaza.

He was shot and seriously injured by the soldiers, on Saturday at night, during a protest in central Gaza, after the army claimed he “breached the perimeter fence.”

Palestinian sources said the teen was near the fence on the Palestinian side, when the soldiers shot and dragged him away.

Shahin suffered a very serious injury, before the army later airlifted him to Soroka hospital, in Be’er as-Sabe’ city (Beersheba), where he died from his wounds.

It is worth mentioning that the Shahin was injured by live Israel army fire several times, including one incident when he had several toes amputated, since the Great Return March procession started on Palestinian Land Day, March 30th, 2018.

On Saturday, a Palestinian child, identified as Mohammad Nasr al-Reefy, 14, died from serious wounds he suffered after the army fired a missile at his home, during the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, in the summer of 2014.